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Rise in federal cyberattacks partly due to better monitoring

The number of cyber incidents affecting U.S. federal agencies shot up 39 percent in 2010, according to a new report from the Office of Management and Budget (OMB), but experts said the increase is partly a reflection of improved discovery capabilities within government.

According to the OMB report, the U.S. Computer Emergency Response Team (US-CERT), a division of the Department of Homeland Security tasked with coordinating the cyber defense of federal agencies, received a total of 107,439 “cyber incident” reports in 2010 from the federal government, state and local governments, commercial enterprises, U.S. citizens and foreign CERT teams. Such reports detail attempts to gain unauthorized access to systems or data, denial of service attacks, or changes to system hardware, firmware or software without the owner’s consent.

The federal government was the target of approximately 41,776 of reported attacks in 2010, up from 30,000 the year before, according to the report.

Experts acknowledged that the number of attacks affecting the federal agencies has increased, but also said the government is doing a better job of monitoring and reporting such incidents.